There are a lot of different ways that you can keep an eye on how your website or sites are doing in terms of search engine optimization.

There are any number of tools out there, both commercially available and free which webmasters can use to monitor the results of their SEO efforts; today we’re going to have a look at one commercial online SEO software produced by Sheer SEO.

I’ve given the free 90-day trial they offer a go in order to be able to provide all of you reading this with a brief rundown of the features of this tool.

The Sheer SEO online SEO software is a web-based SEO monitoring suite which offers most of the features webmasters could want: current and historical page rank for your URL and up to 20 user-defined keywords, the most important referral links by which visitors arrive at your site and a running tally of backlinks.

You’ll also see any mentions of your site on Twitter, social bookmarks pointing to your site, information on keyword density and pages indexed by the major search engines, both in main and supplemental indices.

Also featured is a guarded backlinks feature, allowing users to keep an eye on especially important backlinks; you’ll be alerted if there is any change to these links. This is a feature which those trying to get a new site off the ground may find particularly useful.

Reports can be exported in Excel format. Only one type of report is available using the free trial version, though the paid Light, Standard, Advanced and Professional packages allow more customizable reports and more detailed data along with the ability to track far more keywords and URLs; information is also updated more frequently with the full versions than in the trial version.

One thing that users of this online SEO software should be aware of if they’re considering purchasing this service is that it does not actually do any sort of SEO work for your site. Rather, Sheer SEO’s tool is a fairly comprehensive solution for monitoring the results from the SEO work you perform yourself. It’s a tool which many webmasters will find useful, whether on its own or in conjunction with free tools like Google Analytics.

Is the Sheer SEO online SEO tool worth investing in? The answer to that question all depends on how many of the features of this tool you anticipate needing.

It’s priced on a monthly pay-as-you-go model rather than being purchased outright and while this cost is relatively low, even for the Professional package at $40/month, it’s something which webmasters may want to give a test drive using the free trial first. It’s a powerful SEO monitoring tool and one which is definitely worth giving a look if you’d like to get a handle on your SEO campaigns.